If you're searching for a better way to engage your customers, look no further than email marketing. Modern consumers live in their inboxes, so email is a great way to let them know about an upcoming sale, share coupons or announce new products. It's all about creating positive customer engagement for your business, one open at a time!

So to get the biggest bang for your efforts, it's important to make email a part of your overall marketing strategy.

Here are 10 things to keep in mind when leveraging the power of email:

Easy Integration: Deploying a successful marketing plan requires you to productively engage prospects and customers. Email serves this objective well and can easily be integrated with other aspects of your plan, such as...
· Driving SEO with embedded links to your website
· Tracking customer satisfaction with email surveys, and
· Tracking campaign effectiveness by comparing different email campaigns to each other over time.

Cost-Effective: It doesn't take a large investment to get started with email, and the returns can be fast, measurable and sizable.

Pre-Scheduled Release: Email campaigns can be automated to go out at specific times and on specific days. That way you can send your messages when you think your customers are most likely to read them – regardless of your own schedule. For instance, your customers may check their email most often in the evening or on the weekends (when you're not at the office), so automation will help you reach them at those key times.

Efficient Reach: Email lets you reach a lot of people efficiently ¬– people that you know have an interest in what you have to offer them because they were willing to give you their email address.

Tailored Messaging: You can customize emails to cater to specific audiences in an endless variety of ways, including segmenting messaging by geography, age or gender. Email messages can even be customized to wish a customer happy birthday when their special day rolls around and offer them a special discount.

Interactive: Marketing is all about engagement, and engagement is all about interactive. When using email, the links you deploy can be tracked to website traffic, social media, sales purchase data, customer satisfaction and profitability.

Trackable: All aspects of your marketing activities should be measurable so that you can validate ROI. While email can be low-cost, your time can be expensive. With the right email platform, you can track key performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates and bounce rates.

Test, Refine, Test: Another benefit of a great email platform is the ability to determine which campaigns work better than others, which makes it super easy to adjust your messaging strategy accordingly over time. If you're new to email marketing, you can easily find email templates that you can use to fit your company brand and communication style.

Mobile Optimization: Thanks to the advent of smart phones and tablets, email reaches your target audience beyond their PC and laptop; in fact, 53% of all email is opened on a mobile device (Litmus). That's why it's incredibly important to make sure your emails are always mobile-friendly.

ROI: Here's an interesting fact: Did you know that the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) puts email marketing's return on investment at $40.56 for every $1 invested? We'd say those are some pretty good numbers!

Why should you care?

At the end of the day, productively engaging new and existing customers is key to driving revenue growth, and email provides one of the most powerful and easiest methods to achieve this. That's why it's critical to include it as a part of your strategic marketing toolkit. Plus, with the right features and platform, you'll not only be able to improve sales performance — you'll also have some fun in the process!

Did you know?

...that Emma offers an email marketing solution that contains everything you need to create effective email marketing campaigns? Our platform includes easy to use drag-and-drop design tools, useful options for organizing and segmenting message strategies, tons of helpful analytics to validate ROI, and — last but not least — great onboarding tools that'll help you succeed from the very start. Check out the free-trial offer to take a test drive.

Note: This information has been compiled by the Knowledge Institute for Small Business Development (KISBD) for educational purposes only in order to convey a general overview of the options and related services available to small businesses in the subject areas introduced. Content is provided on an "as is" basis and is not intended to be an exhaustive representation, nor does it provide advice or create a customer relationship between KISBD and its sponsors, buzgate.org, its affiliates and any other organization named herein, and any reader.

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